Memento Duplo by Barrett Bowlin

Your mother, the veterinarian, brings home the ashes of our Staffordshire terrier, and you hold the lacquered rosewood box to your small chest, sad and tight because what happened last week is alive and running and licking your face again, but not the dog itself.

And this is when you ask to see all the boxes of ashes from the shelf up high, of all the pets we’ve ever owned, and we’re in the middle of trying to prepare dinner, buddy, but your mother and I feel it’s important that you learn about death and life and where pets go when they die, and it’s to the coffee table, apparently, the boxes dragged down from above the DVD collection on a Tuesday evening.

We pull down the five we can find. (The sixth, the German shepherd, is probably upstairs, but we’re not sure, really. Look, she’s here someplace, and that’s the important thing.) Your grandmother’s second English springer spaniel is there, clumped like sand into a small cherry wood box, and so is her first spaniel, but this was before the crematory services for the clinic made more formal, somber arrangements, and so the first dog’s remains had been dumped into a white plastic prism but not the remains of the second spaniel, who got a little more dignity than its predecessor, who’s spending eternity now in high-density polyethylene. Our German shepherd’s brother is there, too, and so is the guinea pig, who got his own small box a few days after we’d picked out his replacement so your sister would stop crying. In your hands, you hold what’s left of our brindle pit bull mix as you watch the boxes line up, each size and weight different from the one next to them.

Next to you, our new and energetic corgi (which is living and not dead and is a gift from a friend of your mother’s) jumps up and balances on the edge of the coffee table, right next to the tightly packed boxes of pets that came before her, and if she licks the table, so help me, I will put an end to this exercise in grief. The boxes will go back up on the shelf—I’m serious—right above the blu-rays.

We cook pancakes and eggs while you move and stack the boxes on each other, making skyscrapers out of the dead, a city skyline built around two spires, and while you open up the paneled bottoms of the containers, letting memoriam notes fall out (name, date of expiration) but not the dark mylar bags of the ashes themselves. That, we feel, would be just a little too morbid, and we really, really don’t want to switch on the vacuum tonight or wash soot out of your clothes.

When we ask you to wash your hands, you point a finger at the both of us, yelling, “Why did you kill my dog?” So your mother, the veterinarian, tells you (again) that he was in pain, buddy, so much pain, and we didn’t want him to suffer anymore, did we? No. And when you ask to take the lacquered box upstairs and sleep with it next to your bed, we allow this, too, because it’s just for one night, but not more than two.

Barrett Bowlin teaches film and literature classes at Binghamton University, where he moonlights as a contributing editor for Memorious. Recent stories and essays of his appear in journals like Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hobart, The Rumpus, and Bayou, which awarded him the 2015 James Knudsen Prize in Fiction.